31 March 2014

If
I only had a brain I would not be conversing or consulting with
anything. The flowers would wait in vain for my dulcet repartee; the
rain would be forced to seek managerial guidance elsewhere.It
is opportunistic of me to seize upon the jumbled syntax of the title
of the song from The
Wizard of Oz,
and I know it scans better that way, but I have reasons to do so. My
rediscovery of the song coincided with a time when I was writing an
essay on the subject of personal identity, specifically on its
indeterminacy. And – in connection with that – I was delving
again into Daniel Dennett’s ‘zombie’ thought experiments. It
occurred to me that the Scarecrow – a character for whom I have
some fellow feeling – could be a useful metaphor in that regard,
not only because he is a brainless zombie but also because the title
of the song seems to suggest that he wishes to be the polar opposite.
And what is that? Why, a disembodied brain! Oh, my!What
the Scarecrow really wants is to be whole. He wants the complete set
– a body and
a
brain. He can carry a tune, but he doesn’t think he can carry any
thoughts, and that is a source of some distress for him. He is a
zombie that knows he’s a zombie, so just what kind of zombie does
that make him? Perhaps it makes him what Dennett called a ‘zimbo’:

A
zimbo is a zombie that, as a result of self-monitoring, has internal
(but unconscious) higher-order informational states that are about
its other, lower-order informational states.i

The Scarecrow clearly has self-monitoring enough to inform himself
that he doesn’t have a brain, but if he can’t really carry any
higher-order informational states (due to his lack of a brain) then
maybe he is merely a zombie, not a zimbo.

Meanwhile – in my version of this tale – the Scarecrow’s
brain awaits him in a vat of cerebrospinal fluid, at the Wizard’s
lab. The Wizard knows that the Scarecrow is coming to collect it,
because wires implanted into the brain produce a display of the
brain’s thoughts, which the Wizard can then read. How could the
brain know that the Scarecrow is coming? Is it telepathic? No. It
knows the Scarecrow is coming, because it is the scarecrow that’s
coming.

The cruel Wizard wished to perform an experiment to do with
location of ‘self’. So he removed a man’s brain and placed it
in a vat; he altered the brain’s memories so that it thought it was
a scarecrow; then he connected the brain-in-the-vat wirelessly to the
man’s body. After the encephalectomy operation, he dressed
up the brainless body in ragged clothes stuffed with straw, and then
staked it out in a field near the yellow brick road.

The scarecrow man wakes up in the field, beset by crows, knowing
that he has no brain but not knowing that he was ever anything but a
scarecrow. A girl with a dog frees him from his stake and tells him
that a great wizard will give him a brain, if he goes along with her.
This seems an attractive proposition. Given the circumstances,
Dorothy believes that the man is a scarecrow. And the
brain-in-the-vat’s perception of its remote body has been altered
so that it sees only straw, even upon detailed self-examination of
its body.

We now understand the great mystery of how the brainless Scarecrow
could walk, dance, sing, and even hold a conversation: he could do
all those things because he actually had a brain all along; it
just wasn’t in his body.

Your brain is located in your skull, but that does not mean
that you are located there. Your senses – such as vision, touch,
and hearing – inform you of the position of your body in relation
to other things and people; your sense of proprioception tells
you the position of your limbs in space. That is all. If we were to
stretch your complete sensorium out over many miles, then you would
be gigantic. You might argue that, under those circumstances, you
would only feel gigantic, but why should that be the case? You
feel that you are the size you are only
because your senses provide you with that information. If your senses
were different, you would be different. As we don’t know
where we, as selves, are located – indeed we have no evidence that
we are anywhere – we have this potential adaptability and
zoomability.

So we are not so different from our unfortunate friend the
Scarecrow. When he eventually encounters his brain in the vat, behind
the Wizard’s screen, the Wizard restores his memory of being a man.
Does he now, seeing his brain before him, understand himself as a man
whose thoughts are occurring not in his body but in his brain in the
vat? No. In fact – apart from remembering who he is and realising
that he is not a scarecrow – he feels no different. The Wizard is
content that the experiment has validated his hypothesis.ii

The mainland across the bay looks beautiful today, bathed as it is
in hazy sunshine. I am now being located there, but only very poorly
– this sensorium is so restrictive. Perhaps I’ll pour another
coffee, go and sit outside, and try to think some thoughts I’ve
never thunk before.